Software licensing has grown increasingly complex as offerings of software products (selling units), groupings of software products, and varieties of software products have increased. Frequently, software product(s) employ a grace period during which a user can evaluate a particular software product.
Typically, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) stage an application installation of a client computer on an image of an operating system and then fine tune the installation before shipping the client computer to a customer. Fine tuning of the application installation can trigger an activation timer, so OEMs are permitted to reset the activation timer in order for the customer to fully enjoy a grace period associated with the activation timer. The process of resetting the activation timer can be referred to as “rearming”.
Rearming applications is also useful when a customer desires to have an extended grace time period. In both retail and enterprise environments, customers may desire to have an extended grace period in order to fully evaluate the application. To facilitate this extended grace period, the activation timer can be rearmed one or more times per application.
For example, a system administrator for a large enterprise can obtain a copy of a suite of applications to evaluate without activation. If the system administrator desires to evaluate the suite for ninety days without activation, with a standard activation grace timer of thirty days, the system administrator can run a rearm tool to reset the grace timer every thirty days. The reset would generally have no effect on an absolute evaluation expiration of the suite.